[Suggestion] For anyone who had their account hacked

[Steamtyme]

First off this is a band-aid solution suggestion, to help hold maintain your reputation with a new account. This will in no way move along your account recovery, but I feel it is a better option than the recent suggestions of buying an account; which is a terrible practice on so many levels.

Secondly- This does not apply to banned accounts, you deserve your punishment.


First follow the steps found here Recovering hacked accounts or accounts with lost passwords

Now the parts you are not going to like. You need to create a new account, there is no way around it. Recovery is currently 8 months+, maybe longer I honestly don't remember seeing an account recovered.

• Go to this thread with your new account and post a signed message, the same way you would have when following the recovery guidelines
• In that same post ad a link to your hacked account
• Someone will verify the message for you, quote it and post that it is verified
• Place a text copy of the link to the verified message from the above thread in your signature space
• You can update the signature space as you progress in rank, but due to newbie restrictions that is the best you can do for now.

Obviously this is not perfect, far from it. Some users do not need it, but there are accounts out there that have built up a reputation that is difficult to let go of. Especially in the Marketplace, it could help people continue to make sales or trades with users their original account had dealt with in the past. You will still have to explain to anyone you chose what the situation is and can tell them where to look for the verified proof that the accounts are linked.

Here are some other options. You can purchase a copper membership to lift some of the restrictions on Sig space, and posting images.
It would be nice to see the fee waived by Theymos, but I imagine that would require the same amount of work/effort as account recovery. So instead a fee reimbursement may be nice after the fact.

When discussing with another individual at some point these are some thought I had for afterwards. I think if an account is recovered, there should be some way of locking the secondary account and transferring any earned Merit and Activity to the primary account. This would be a one time option and up to the account holder.

Edited opening line

[Sifon]

This is succinct enough in my honest opinion, but I feel the process is extremely cumbersome. I guess it's the reason you added this in your post

.... Recovery is currently 8 months+, maybe longer I honestly don't remember seeing an account recovered.

Seems to me like a journey of no return. The best bet would be to get a copper membership, with some reimbursement in place as opined by you.

[Insanerman]

Am I the only one who thinks that reimbursement and transferring of merits and other stuff in the hacked/recovered account is more laborious for the admins than simply recovering the hacked/ forgotten password accounts.

Or it's just that I do not know how hard is the process when recoverring an account

[Steamtyme]

Snip

Your not wrong. There are only a few accounts that may benefit from this sort of linking. Whether it's worth it for people I leave up to them, but thought I'd put something out there besides - suck it up and move on.

Snip

Not wrong, afaik. I'm not really sure how hard it is, the only stat that actually matters out of them would probably be Merit, as most people don't earn more merit than activity.

Again it's not really about which is easier or not. The fact is account recovery currently has a long wait period and people need to accept that for now. The ideas of transfers would just be a nice light at the end of the tunnel for those that care.

It's also my attempt at putting something out there as an option against people buying accounts; as that is an idea that seems to be gaining traction. I'd rather not see this become a common practice because people are frustrated about locked accounts. This idea could work for anyone, assuming their only reason for being here isn't earning money based on their rank.